An unforgettable portrait of a marriage tested to its limits.

When Dan, a writer with a passion for underground comics, and his wife Bekah, a potter dedicated to traditional Japanese ceramics, met through a mutual friend, they swiftly fell in love. "Of all the women I've ever met," Dan told a friend, "she's the first one who felt like family." But at Christmas, as they prepared for the birth of their first child, tragedy struck.

Based on Daniel Raeburn's acclaimed New Yorker essay, Vessels: A Memoir of What Wasn't is the story of how the couple clashed and clung to each other through a series of unsuccessful pregnancies before finally, joyfully, becoming parents. In prose as handsomely unadorned as his wife's pottery, Raeburn recounts a marriage cemented by the same events that nearly broke it.

Vessels is an unflinching, enormously moving account of intimacy, endurance and love.

"[Vessels] is not only a poignant expression of how two young people matured as they created a family. It is also a celebration of the way that birth - even if that birth ends in sudden death - brings new life to parents. An eloquently candid memoir." - Kirkus

"Affecting and often wrenching... Raeburn writes palpably of loss and anguish, but also shows how love, hope and resilience triumph over despair." - Publishers Weekly

"An eloquently candid memoir.... The narrative is not only a poignant expression of how two young people matured as they created a family. It is also a celebration of the way that birth-even if that birth ends in sudden death-brings new life to parents." - Kirkus Reviews

"More than offering a simple tale about grief and the struggles of parenthood, Raeburn speaks to the emotional influence of those we try to bring into the world and the lives we are responsible for." - Booklist